This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Certain abbreviations that may be found in the description and/or in the Figures are herewith defined as follows:                3GPP Third Generation Partnership Project        C-RNTI Cell RNTI        CSI Channel State Information        DCI Downlink Control Information        DL, D Downlink        DRX Discontinuous Reception        DTX Discontinuous Transmission        EPDCCH Enhanced Physical Downlink Control Channel        eIMTA Enhanced Interference Management and Traffic Adaptation        eNB Enhanced Node B (Base Station)        F Flexible        FDD Frequency Division Duplexing        HARQ Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request        L1 Layer One        LTE Long Term Evolution        MAC Medium Access Control        MIB Master Information Block        NCT New Carrier Type        NSN Nokia Siemens Networks        PBCH Physical Broadcast Channel        PCFICH Physical Control Format Indicator Channel        PDCCH Physical Downlink Control Channel        PDSCH Physical Downlink Shared Channel        PHY Physical Layer        PUCCH Physical Uplink Control Channel        PUSCH Physical Uplink Shared Channel        RAN Radio Access Network        Rel Release        RNTI Radio Network Temporary Identifier        RRC Radio Resource Control        S Special        SFN System Frame Number        SIB-1 System Information Block #1        TDD Time Division Duplexing        TD-LTE Time Division (TDD) LTE        UE User Equipment        UL, U Uplink        WG Working Group        
Release 12 of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard deals with LTE-Advanced systems. Techniques for dynamic uplink-downlink (UL-DL) reconfiguration fall within the scope of a 3GPP Release 12 Work Item entitled, “Further Enhancements to LTE TDD for DL-UL Interference Management and Traffic Adaptation”, referred to hereinafter as “eIMTA.”
Conventional techniques for performing dynamic UL-DL reconfiguration have shortcomings. For example, the UE may not have reliable information regarding the UL-DL configuration that the UE is supposed to use at the time when the reconfiguration should be applied. Moreover, it is difficult or impractical to optimize conventional solutions for different scenarios. For example, signaling overhead is not minimized in a typical scenario where the switching periodicity applied by the network is on the order of tens of milliseconds. Hence, there is a clear need for more advanced solutions for performing dynamic UL-DL reconfiguration.